Whew! It’s been a while. I’m still here. Living. Writing. Laughing when I can. I’ve thought about blogging twenty times a day since the last post ten months ago. I have snaps on my phone that make no sense now, but at the time, I connected them to an idea. Something to share here.

I wasn’t ready.

Hence, the graphic ↑.

Last week, Cherry cleaned her room. If you know a normal sixteen-year-old, then you understand the magnitude of the event.

“Conversation starters. The white elephant gift from the swim team Christmas party.”

It’s been parked on my desk since. This morning, I opened the box and withdrew the first card.

How do you measure success and who do would you consider a successful person?

Taylor Swift. Barack Obama. J. K. Rowling. Elisabeth Crisp.

Success isn’t talent, money, power, or accolades. It’s knowing at the end of the day, I’ve done my job. It’s a line of sequential X’s on the calendar, representing the days I put a pen to paper, fed my family, bound a wound, or made another person laugh. Success is measured in quantity time.

Just walk into your local book store or grocery store and see how many romance novels are on the shelves. Some girls will not want you to know that they are finding it tough after a break up and will put on a brave facade to not let you know how much they are hurting. She may even contact you before you get in touch with her.

Honest to gosh, I copied and pasted the words above directly from Akismet. Unlike most of my spam, it’s almost coherent. It’s punctuated. It uses verb tenses correctly. And that last line, “She may even contact you before you get in touch with her,” shows empathy. It’s conspiratorial. Winking.

I see him in the bookstore, hiding like a creep in the stacks of Romance, spying on the lovelorn ingénue, waiting for his big chance to offer her a personal-sized pack of Kleenex. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Do you read Nora Roberts? Here’s my number. Call me, maybe?”

Or.

He stalks her in Fantasy and Science Fiction. At the precise moment she turns a corner, he blocks her path. Hulk green and drooling. “Do you wanna dance, Baby?” Spittle litters the napless carpet. She runs away, cowering between the blank books and the greeting cards.

Or.

She sees him in Children’s, legs folded criss-cross applesauce, reading Winnie-the-Pooh aloud to no one in particular. She sighs. “He’s the Piglet to my Pooh.”